HBO’s The Last of Us evaluation: hope in the zombie apocalypse — for some

If we settle for as proven fact that The Last of Us, the 2013 PlayStation 3 online game from a studio referred to as Naughty Dog, is a exceptional achievement in digital storytelling — and why not? there are all types of achievements — then its HBO adaptation is a long-awaited kind of vindication. Here, on the community that defines “prestige TV” in the minds of many viewers, is a live-action model of what could be the most lauded story in video video games, Cormac McCarthy with a joystick. Time folds in on itself: In 2013, the sport is in comparison with an HBO collection in good-natured jest; in 2023, the tongue-in-cheek chorus is now actual, and animated performers give solution to flesh-and-blood ones reenacting their programmed actions with dizzying verisimilitude. The content material singularity is upon us, and it’s truly fairly entertaining.

The Last of Us follows Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler residing in a time after the world has succumbed to a mutated model of the Cordyceps fungus that turns folks into violent zombielike creatures. It’s a genuinely unsettling twist on the conventional zombie, taking an actual group of parasitic fungi that infect bugs and imagining what would occur if it made the leap to people. However, very similar to the most profitable zombie apocalypse story in current reminiscence, The Walking Dead, The Last of Us is much less involved with its signature monsters and extra with what occurs to humanity after society’s collapse.

The Last of Us’ survey of post-apocalyptic America kicks off when Joel will get a job he doesn’t need and didn’t ask for: smuggling Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a profane teenager, throughout the nation to a hideout run by the Fireflies, a vigilante militia against what stays of the federal authorities. For causes nobody is aware of or understands, Ellie is proof against Cordyceps an infection, and the Fireflies, led by the pragmatic Marlene (Merle Dandridge, one of the solely actors reprising their function from the online game), hope that Ellie is the key to curing the world.

Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO

This acquainted dynamic varieties the backbone of The Last of Us, in which a grumpy older man should defend a plucky younger woman, and their relationship over time turns from resentful to appreciative. As shopworn as this type of pairing is (doubly so for followers of the sport), Pascal and Ramsey are tremendously good on display screen collectively. Pascal’s Joel is extra haunted than gruff, and Ramsey brings a meaner edge to Ellie that does rather a lot to transcend what started in the online game as a conduit for paternal emotions.

And sure, The Last of Us is a online game adaptation, maybe the most devoted one dedicated to the display screen to date. In its first season — which runs for 9 episodes, all of which I’ve seen — the collection intently follows the blueprint laid out by the PlayStation 3 (and 4, and 5) sport, with whole scenes and features of dialogue lifted verbatim from it, digital appearing made flesh once more. What the collection provides to the authentic narrative is a bit more perspective: Where the online game is proscribed to Ellie’s and Joel’s subjective experiences, the collection sometimes takes the time to step away from them and present the viewer what life is like for others when Joel and Ellie aren’t passing by means of.

These moments are simply the finest The Last of Us has to supply, as fleeting as they’re. (The present’s finest episode is an hour virtually wholly devoted to an off-screen relationship that’s barely hinted at in the online game.) It’s in expounding on the individuals who fill this faithfully recreated world that The Last of Us is ready to calm down and be a superb TV present. But in their hurry to get shifting and get to the subsequent tailored set-piece, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (himself co-director of the authentic sport) regularly breeze previous characters that yearn to fill the house afforded by the story’s new medium.

Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO

What’s irritating about that is that the HBO collection’ additions to the story are what make The Last of Us nonetheless really feel worthwhile in 2023, a full decade after the online game made waves for its aesthetic embrace of status TV. The major plot of The Last of Us, as reproduced in the collection, is about as bleak as you’d count on — a string of encounters the place Joel and Ellie meet another person, they’re revealed to have a heartbreaking story or a horrible secret, after which they meet a horrific finish earlier than our heroes should be on their approach.

Yet in taking time to think about the inhabitants of the world Joel and Ellie are journeying by means of, The Last of Us makes a case for itself in distinction to the different large cultural touchstone it is going to probably be in comparison with. Unlike The Walking Dead, it severely considers the thought of group in the post-apocalypse. In reality, group is the final aim of survival in The Last of Us, as Joel and Ellie regularly see how different folks stay — below the strict regime of FEDRA, the closest factor to a federal authorities there’s; alone with their family members; in a socialist encampment slowly inching towards normalcy; in a spiritual cult that provides solace from worry.

The Last of Us isn’t rigorous in its exploration of these concepts — the present, like its supply materials, has a fairly clear view on what’s the “right” solution to stay in a group — however it’s simply sufficient to make the collection really feel extra hopeful than most of its friends in post-apocalyptic fiction. How a lot of that hope is felt will depend upon the lens the viewer brings to the present, because it (in a blunder bafflingly just like its supply materials) often has its queer/BIPOC characters violently killed. As a outcome, it’s onerous to make a case for The Last of Us past its novelty as a online game adaptation. On its personal, it’s one of dozens of zombie-filled wastelands that viewers can stream, from the U.S. and past. When you may select your individual apocalypse, it’s onerous to say why anybody would decide this one.

The secret to The Last of Us’ success as a online game wasn’t essentially in originality. Zombies have been already previous hat in 2013, as The Walking Dead was at the peak of its reputation with the nongaming crowd, and sport publishers have been blissful to flood the market with violent titles that entailed surviving hordes of zombies or zombielike creatures. The Last of Us’ trick, then, was bringing some humanity again to a medium that was regularly desirous to back-burner it, rooting its gamers in the characters they performed as and making them really feel guilt over the violence they perpetrated towards these they didn’t. In context, it transcended its rote story and have become a milestone for a whole business. Its tv adaptation arrives in a medium with no such baggage. Here, the story of The Last of Us lives or dies the approach most artwork does: in the methods it’s human, and the methods it fails to be.

The Last of Us premieres on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, Jan. 15.